When multiple client entities exist in the same trust domain, but rely on a central entity such as a controller or gateway to manage communications between the client entities and handle client entity tasks, the impact of compromise or spoofing of the central entity may be significant from a system-level perspective. For example, software-defined networking (SDN) may support virtualized server and storage infrastructures in data centers and high performance computing (HPC) environments. In such a case, an SDN controller may act as a centralized control point in the SDN, managing the flow of data between virtual switches that communicate with one another only through the SDN controller. Accordingly, a successful attack that compromises the trustworthiness of the SDN controller may in turn comprise the entire infrastructure.